The Tricky Science of Olympic Gender Testing

First time accepted submitter erdos-bacon sandwich writes "Gender tests may be the most controversial obstacle the athletes face. The London Games tries a new approach based on testosterone. Of all the obstacles athletes have had to overcome to compete in the Olympics, perhaps the most controversial has been the gender test. Originally designed to prevent men from competing in women's events, it is based on the premise that competitors can be sorted into two categories via established scientific rules. But the biological boundaries of gender aren't always clear."

Comments

Is that a man or a woman?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer: yes.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trouble is, sometimes the answer is no.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[ArsenneLupin]

Trouble is, sometimes the answer is no.

... and sometimes, the answer is "both"...

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[drkim]

SEA is area with prominently open approach to ladyboys (transponders)

My ladyboy usually squawks 7000.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except categories in sports are defined by sex not gender so what they believe to be does not matter when it comes to decide in which category they can compete.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[Rei]

However, you must also understand that some (most? I'm not that clear on the subject) don't believe to be women. They don't believe to be men either. They believe they're 'third' gender.

Those who don't consider themselves to be either would be lumped into a category like "genderqueer" rather than "transsexual". It's interesting how culture plays into gender identity and sexuality, too. Each society has different "bins", categories people can fall into, and you only get a sort of revolution, a breaking of the norms, when the limits of said categories are too confining for enough of the people in the society. The standard of course, at a minimum, is straight male and straight female. But many societies have had more. Two examples among thousands:

1) Historic (and to a very tiny degree, modern) Albania had the "sworn virgins". These were people born as woman who would swear an oath to never sleep with a man. They then would live in men's clothing, could marry women, had men's property rights, and so forth; they were legally treated as men. There was no reverse situation. The concept was created to deal with families who only had female heirs, and the person would often swear at a young age, but some people would swear later in life, so there's some mix between "obligation" and "wanting" in the concept.

2) The Samoan Fa'afafine is people who are anatomically male but live as women and are fully treated as women by society. It's so accepted that it's rare for parents to try to discourage an anatomically male child from living as a Fa'afafine. It is a much more informal concept.

When you look at societies like that, you find that a lot of people living as the third gender identify specifically as the third gender. Some, however, do not, but said "third gender" is the closest that's accepted in their society to how they feel - for example, a person who is simply gay, or simply transsexual but not attracted to members of the same anatomic sex, is put in a bind. In some cases, being seen specifically as a member of the opposite anatomic sex, rather than a third gender, is very important to the person. And of course, rarely in societies do you see matching pairs of concepts - there may be an accepted third gender for anatomic males or anatomic females without an equivalent for the other.

A really extreme example of people being forced into specific categories from modern society can be found in modern Iran. Transsexuality is accepted in Iran - not to a great degree (although to a surprising degree) among the populace, but fully accepted within law (actually, it's handled better in Iranian law than in most western nations). Homosexuality, however, is punishable by death. So there can be significant pressure for gay individuals to physically alter their sex.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[metrix007]

Gender is generally considered a separate thing from sex. This article about determining an athletes sex, in which a ladyboy would be considered male, whether they like it or not.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[JasterBobaMereel]

Try Lydia Fairchild she gave birth to three children that were hers biologically, but blood tests showed she was unrelated to ... she is a Human Chimera and has two sets of DNA and chromosomes

It is therefore possible that the two sets could be different genders... and the answer could really be both ...

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[h4rr4r]

So define that? It will not be easy.

Do you base it on sex organs? Genetic tests, which may not match sex organs? Levels of certain hormones in the blood?

All of these methods have edge cases.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[billybob2001]

The London 2012 Olympics has already definitvely tested all of the athletes, during the opening ceremony.

Near the end of Paul McCartney's performance of Let It Be, in the singalong "Na-na-na-nah" part, he made some subliminal audience participation requests:

"Just the men", followed by "Now just the women" - and a host of cameras trained on the athletes recorded who sang along to which section.

Foolproof!

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[David Chappell]

Except categories in sports are defined by sex not gender so what they believe to be does not matter when it comes to decide in which category they can compete.

Not sure what distinction you are trying to draw between sex and gender. It can be confusing because "gender" now means what we used to call "sex". You have likely read books written before 1950 in which characters use expressions such as "a member of my sex", "the battle of the sexes". The statement "I want to talk about sex." would likely have been understood to mean "I want to talk about the social implications of being male and female."

I have here a dictionary written in 1955 which under "sex" gives the meaning of maleness or femaleness and "the attraction of one sex to the other". It doesn't even meantion that it could mean the sex act. This meaning appears to have become popular in the 1960's. With sex now being a word that made small boys titter, those who wanted to talk about the social implications of sex (maleness or famaleness) borrowed the term from grammar. It would be too embarrasing to say that one was taking "Sex Studies" in college, so they called it "Gender Studies".

Having thought about the above, you think you are saying that the problem is deciding who is female biologically as opposed to who can function as a female in society. The problem is that a small but significant part of the population displays testable physical characterisics of both sexes. For example, there are persons who are genetically male, but have female bodies. The IOC is thrashing around trying to find a definition of a female body.

I think the reason they have dropped testing of all athelets who claim to be female is that once you select women with strong, athletic bodies, you increase the likelihood that some measure of their bodies will be closer to that of male bodies. If you then disqualify them as "technically male", you create a scandal and humiliate them. If, when her picture appears in news stories, the public perceives her as being a member of the female sex, you then look ridiculous as well.

On the other hand, if you test no one, soon the women's division of sports requiring strength will be filled with men without beards and underdeveloped genitals.

Re:Is that a man or a woman?

[Rei]

I'm guessing you haven't met many transsexuals if you think they tend to live to gender stereotypes any more than other members of the target sex. The standard joke about how to tell the difference between a MTF-crossdresser and a trans woman is that when the crossdresser gets home from work, he takes off his pants and put on a dress. When the transsexual gets home from work, she takes off her dress and puts on a pair of pants.

It's easy to say that something is just a societal construct, but everyone in this world interacts with societal constructs and has elements of their identity impacted by them and has it change how they interact with others. Try going into a party and saying that you work as a pizza deliveryman when they ask what you do for a living, then go into a different party and say you're an investment banker, and judge the reactions in how you're treated. There's whole social constructs built even around concepts like "pizza deliveryman" and "investment banker", let alone something as fundamental as gender.

Beyond that, there's very good evidence that transsexualism is not simply a "social construct", nor is gendered behavior in general. There are both structural and functional differences in male and female brains, and in some very specific regards, transsexual brains tend to more closely match those of the target sex (both in functional and structural exams) than the anatomic sex.

Re:How hard can it be?

[oiron]

RTFA!

Consider the Spanish hurdler Maria Jose Martinez-Patiño. A gender test revealed that she had a Y chromosome, which normally makes a person male. She also had complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, which prevented her body from responding properly to testosterone and caused her to develop as a woman.

It's not as simple as you'd think...

Re:How hard can it be?

[cstacy]

XX = Woman XY = Man

Gender is not what they want to test for, it is a PROXY for what they want to test for.
This is not a technology problem, and it's not even about genitalia.
It's about a definition of fairness, and that's harder to elaborate.

Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting out the swimming pool is much like getting out a bath. She's clean.

Re:How hard can it be?

[AmiMoJo]

Some sports are all about genetic abnormalities. Bolt's genetic material must be quite unusual for him to go that fast.

Re:How hard can it be?

[Pseudonym]

This is they key point. "Freaks of nature" are over-represented in the elite athlete community already. That's part of what makes them elite. Why should abnormalities related to sex chromosomes or hormones be any different?

Re:Why seperate competions by gender anyway?

[Eskarel]

The reason is that, at least in theory, the Olympic games are about the effort and discipline it takes to get to the elite level than about genetics. Throwing out the hard work of women because they are biologically different(most specifically this relates to the structure of their hips, though other factors certainly play a part) doesn't fit that spirit.

Now you can argue that the Olympics are won largely by genetic freaks, and there's no Olympics for the "normals", but that's really rather beside the point, because the genetics won't give you the whole puzzle. It's true that if you or I spent as many hours training as Bolt we likely still wouldn't even be able to qualify for the Olympics, but simultaneously if all Bolt did was sit on his couch and eat chips, he wouldn't either.

More importantly the original revival of the Olympics was just part of the whole Eugenics craze of that era in history and you can't really breed a super race without super women as well as super men. The fact that an entire army of genetically superior super people could probably be defeated by a cripple with a brain and a chemistry lab doesn't fit into the world view of the kind of people who started this crap.

Re:Confusing terminology

[spazdor]

There is absolutely no rule against a physically female athlete participating in a women's race if he phychologically identifies himself as male.

ftfy: perhaps olympic races are sexed, but English pronouns are gendered. :)

Re:How hard can it be?

[HungryHobo]

Still no good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRY

You can have a Y chromosome which lacks a gene or 2 and be physically totally female.

or you can have 2 X chromosomes and be physically totally male but with a part of a Y chromosome copied on to one or both of the X's

or you can have a mix within your body with half your cells one way and half the other.

consider the posibility that *you* simply lack understanding before declaring that someone else is overcomplicating things. some things really are more complex than the "childrens first science book" version.

Re:How hard can it be?

[quantaman]

This is they key point. "Freaks of nature" are over-represented in the elite athlete community already. That's part of what makes them elite. Why should abnormalities related to sex chromosomes or hormones be any different?

Say you had separate a basketball event for people under 6 feet tall.

Than anyone in that event who seemed to have excess height would need to be carefully tested.

As it is we have separate events for men and women.

So any woman who gets too close to the line defining male needs to be carefully tested.

And make no mistake, you need to draw that line somewhere, and where ever you draw it there are going to be people who straddle it.

Obfix: get rid of gender categories

[rve]

The only catch all, fool proof and totally fair fix for this is the simplest of all: get rid of men's and women's events, and let both compete in the same event. Maybe add performance based tiers instead, so the very best women will mostly compete with guys (and lose, because, you know, testosterone really does work) and the second tier guys will be mostly competing against the best women (and win, again the testosterone thing). Ok, in most sports, women wouldn't get to compete at the highest level any more, but it would be completely fair towards the non-standard gender community!

Re:Overcomplicating things?

[jamesh]

Checking the chromosome might work until you find someone with a missing piece

AIS throws that out the window... genetically a male but somewhat or completely (depending on the degree) insensitive to the androgen that would give them the male characteristics leaving them in the default female form.

Re:How hard can it be?

[Jesrad]

Oh yes, how hard can it be...

Check one:
[ XX ] Woman
[ XY ] Man

What if I'm XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) ? What if I'm just X (Turner Syndrome) ? What if I'm XX but SR-Y positive due to gene translocation ? What if I'm XY but Completely Androgen Insensitive (CAIS) ?
What if some of my cells are XY, but the others are X, or XX, or XXY (mosaicism and chimerism, sometimes combiend with the syndromes above, see the famous case of Lydia Fairchild for a primer) ? Do we decide sex on the cells' majority+1 ? Or should part of my body compete in the Mens' races, and the other part in Womens' ?

Re:How hard can it be?

[rve]

Some sports are all about genetic abnormalities. Bolt's genetic material must be quite unusual for him to go that fast.

This is a rather fatalistic misconception about talent. Bolt is as fast as he is, not because of some lucky draw in the gene pool, but because of proper training and starting at a young age. He wasn't born with his perfect technique, he got that through training. Of course you have to be healthy and have a bit of luck as well, and the right mix of fast and slow twitch muscles for your sport, but for every kind of mix of the two there's a sport to excel in.

Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test

[samkass]

Because Chinese athletes beating US ones must be due to China having access to advanced future technology, because there is no way they could beat americans otherwise? No, wait, what?

That's not why people suspect it. She beat her own best time by five seconds, which is unheard of in swimming which is the only sport measured to the thousand-of-a-second. She also beat the previous world record by one second which was made with the now-banned super-swimsuit. She could have had a really, really good day, and good for her, but I can see why some other team's coaches might, in their frustration, suspect something else is going on.

Re:How hard can it be?

[narcc]

Let's not forget XYZZY

Re:How hard can it be?

[Rei]

So if a person's body develops as a woman, they're still a man, even though by all objective standards beyond the chromosomes, they're a woman? That's a really strange conception.

And hey, lets just blur your chromosome standard. What about a person who has a Y-chromosome but a broken SRY (the gene region that triggers the initial male-development cascade)? What if they have a Y with *no* SRY? What if they're XX but contain a migrated SRY and developed into a male as a consequence? What if they're a chimera and gained their male-developmental trigger from a minority of their body's cells? What if the cascade began without SRY due to another genetic defect? What if it failed despite SRY due to another genetic defect?

And think about the practical aspects of your standard. Should a man who's XX but has fully male traits, from genitalia to musculature, get to compete in womens' events? Really? You're going to have a *lot* of ticked off women if you do that, let me tell you...

Re:Simple, surely

[Rei]

Just to pick one of the countless examples of where your test goes wrong: 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD). 5-alpha reductase is the chemical which converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a much more potent form which in particular has effects on hair patterning and genitalia. A person with an extreme form of DHT is born as a pretty normal woman, and is thus typically raised as a girl. However, when they hit puberty, the surge of regular testosterone often proves enough to cause the descention of the gonads and the development of a small penis from the clitoris. It's even possible sometimes, with difficulty, to father children.

So when they're young do they compete in girls' events and when they're older guys' events, and when they're in-between... both?

Passing drug tests != competing clean

[sjbe]

Is it true that the Chinese girl has passed all the drug testing? Is it true that she is clean?

You can pass all the drug tests and still have doped. Marion Jones is an admitted doper who never tested positive. Drug tests are rather specific in what they test for and what they can find. The dopers are typically a step ahead of the tests to catch them. Saying an athlete is clean and saying they passed all their drug tests are completely different statements. You cannot conclusively prove that an athlete is competing clean - that would be trying to prove a negative. You can say that an athlete has not failed specific drug tests but that tests only a limited number of possible doping methodologies.

Re:Confusing terminology

[metacell]

Gender is not just a linguistic term, it's also a sociological term. If society treats you as a (man|woman), then your gender is (male|female).

Re:How hard can it be?

[Overzeetop]

but for every kind of mix of the two there's a sport to excel in.

No, actually there isn't. You need only to go to any adolescent training area to see that the very top athletes do not come from the ranks of those who have neither inherent strength, agility, and/or flexibility, and yet train with the masters. It would be like saying that anyone can become a nobel prize winning scientist if they simply studied more, or one of the top two or three musicians on an instrument/voice in the world by just practicing at an early age. It's not that easy or we would all be masters of our craft.

Genetics plays a primary role in selection of the top 1e-8 fraction of athletes in the world. I'll agree that without proper training, that'll get you no more than a spot in your local rec league, but without the proper genetic mix you can probably forget about multiple olympic gold medals no matter how hard you train.

Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test

[AngryDeuce]

Yeah, but believe me, if a spectator goes to do it everyone gets all bitchy about it. Where's the fairness in that?

Strong circumstantial evidence

[sjbe]

Because Chinese athletes beating US ones must be due to China having access to advanced future technology, because there is no way they could beat americans otherwise? No, wait, what?

No because the circumstantial facts indicate there is a very high probability of doping. It's demonstrably possible to evade doping tests. Marion Jones (an American) passed every drug test she took while winning multiple world and olympic medals and yet she is an admitted doper. You can be absolutely certain that there are numerous athletes from all over the world at the Olympics who are doping but will not be caught.

Otherworldly improvements in performance at that level almost never happen. People do not beat their best times in a relatively short event by multiple seconds in relatively short swimming events just coincidentally when they happen to be at the Olympics. Women do not swim a faster last 50 meters than the men in the same event. World records do not fall by wide margins. Add in that the Chinese swimming program has a well recorded history of doping and being caught doing it.

Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test

[AngryDeuce]

No, but to ignore the fishy bullshit they've pulled in the past is retarded, too. If you believe they're on the up and up, that's fine, but forgive us for a little incredulity when they've demonstrated that they'll play games like this before.

Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test

[AmiMoJo]

She beat her own best time by five seconds, which is unheard of in swimming which is the only sport measured to the thousand-of-a-second.

Actually a few top British swimmers made gains of a few seconds during their teenage years. There was another claim about her going faster than the fastest man in the last 50m of the race, but actually so did another British female swimmer in her event. The man in question was so far ahead he didn't need to go top speed to win, so presumably saved some energy for the next race.

As training and technique developers this sort of thing does happen. Look at Bolt, the guy beat the 100m world record without even trying (he was slowing down at the end when we realized he had an unbeatable lead). He is also quite tall, which used to be considered a hindrance in the 100m, but it turned out our understanding of the sport was wrong.

She won, she tested clean for all known doping agents, she has been tested at least four times over the previous year and several times at the Olympics. No need for sour grapes and innuendo.

Re:Wait a second there ...

[Hatta]

This is exactly right. Having seperate Olympic games for women is like having a separate Fields medal for women. No woman has ever been awarded the Fields medal for her work in mathematics. Does that mean we should create a woman's Field's medal?

I don't understand why women don't consider the women's events condescending. In any other circumstance, if you tell a woman "you're good at X, for a woman", she'll be offended. But if you hand her a gold medal while saying the same thing, somehow it's OK.

Re:Intersex is not the same as gay or transgender

[jc42]

the only difference from every other woman is that they could not have children since they had no ovaries

That's Nature trying to tell you something. Weird edge cases like that should not exist.

On the contrary, it's "Nature" that produced the described intermediate case, and Nature is never trying to tell us anything. Nature isn't an intelligent creature, and is incapable of having thoughts or purposes, much less communicating them.

There are plenty of species that produce non-reproducing individuals as a normal part of the population. In bees and ants, the overwhelming majority are such sterile, non-reproducing "females". In such species, this is not just normal; it's the basis of their evolutionary success. And note that there's at least one species (the domestic honeybee) that's quite important to us humans. All those little worker bees busy pollinating our crops are non-reproducing somatic females. If you think they're a weird edge case that shouldn't exist, you're asking for a major agricultural disaster. ;-)

Granted, in humans it really is an edge case. But it's really nothing more than a biochemical accident. There's no intelligence or "life force" or whatever trying to tell us anything.

Telling "Nature" that something shouldn't exist is utterly futile. The universe produces what it produces, and doesn't care what you or I think. Punishing such "weird" individuals amounts to punishing innocent victims of random biochemical accidents. Do you really want a society in which such punishment is allowed or encouraged?

Re:Intersex is not the same as gay or transgender

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did nature create them?

Well it turns out in nature families with a gay relative are more successful in times of stress. The non-child bearing additional adult contributes to the success of the family without adding the weight of another child to feed. In colloquial terms, the gay uncle brings food to the family when they are starving, when he wouldn't do that if he had his own kids.

There are studies on this, if you go looking for them.

Re:Intersex is not the same as gay or transgender

[jc42]

In the cases of Ants and Bees, the difference between a Breeding female (queen) and a worker female (drone) is not genetic, it is environmental.

Nonsense. It's completely genetic. The suppression of the workers' reproductive system is triggered by pheromones produced by the queen, and the queen contains genes that control this production. The workers' reaction to the pheromones is controlled by their genes. Actually, the genes are shared by the queen and worker, whose caste is determined by the activation of other genes. The entire setup is determined by the colony's shared genes, not by anything in the environment.

Treating the queen an workers as independent creatures and treating the reproductive pheromones as "environmental" shows a severe misunderstanding of the concept of "environment". Honeybees were one of the primary species that led biologists to develop the concept of a colonial "super-organism", treating bee and ant colonies as a single "individual" for many purposes. There are a lot of problems and open questions with such concepts, but it's clear that treating interactions between different members of a Hymenoptera colony as "external" is simply wrong. You can only make sense of such social creatures by treating the colony as a third "level" between the individual and the environment. The colony's properties are in many respects more similar to our bodies' internal properties than they are to the colony's environment.